NEWSLETTER.md
March 21, 2026
Beads v0.62 is the release where beads becomes fully standalone. Gas Town-specific concepts have been systematically removed from the codebase — no more GUPP references, polecat terminology, HOP fields, or hardcoded ~/gt/ paths. Beads is beads. It works with Gas Town, but it doesn't need it.
The other headline: embedded Dolt support has made dramatic progress. DoltHub's coffeegoddd landed 73 commits advancing in-process Dolt — the last major gate before v1.0.0.
We're actively targeting Beads v1.0.0. The gate is embedded Dolt completion — running Dolt in-process without a separate server. This matters because standalone users (the majority) should get a zero-config experience: bd init, bd create, done. No server to manage.
The embedded Dolt work is making excellent progress. 73 commits from the Dolt team landed in this release alone, covering create, list, update, close, show, delete, search, query, label, gate, graph, views, and more. A shared issueops package now provides transaction-based operations used by both the server and embedded backends.
Once embedded Dolt covers the full command surface and standalone users report a smooth experience, we ship 1.0. We estimate this is weeks away, not months.
The biggest internal change in v0.62 is the systematic removal of Gas Town-specific concepts:
~/gt/ paths replaced with config-driven pathsBEADS_ACTOR is now the primary env var (BD_ACTOR remains as deprecated fallback)Beads integrates with Gas Town through clean interfaces, not internal coupling. This separation is prerequisite for a credible 1.0 — beads should work identically whether you're running a full Gas Town, using it with another orchestrator, or just tracking issues solo.
Beads has always let you define custom statuses. Now you can assign them to categories that control behavior:
bd config set status.custom "in_review:active,qa_testing:wip,archived:done,on_hold:frozen"
bd ready (available for claiming)bd list by defaultThe new bd statuses command lists all statuses with their icons and categories. --json for programmatic use.
The fifth tracker plugin: bd ado sync, bd ado status, bd ado projects. Follows the same pattern as GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Linear — configure your ADO org and project, and work items sync bidirectionally. This was a community-requested integration driven by enterprise users.
bd note <id> <text> — Shorthand for appending notes without bd update --note ceremony. Small ergonomic win that adds up.
bd statuses — Lists all built-in and custom statuses with icons, categories, and descriptions.
Status, assignee, and priority changes are now logged to .beads/interactions.jsonl. Close reasons are captured in the audit trail. This log survives Dolt GC flatten — even if you aggressively compact your database history, the audit trail persists as a flat file.
bd init preserves ALL pre-existing git hooks, not just beads-managed onesBEADS_HOOK_TIMEOUT) for chained hooksGET_LOCK to prevent journal corruption in multi-agent environmentsKillStaleServers respects server ownership, won't kill externally-managed servers73 commits from DoltHub engineer coffeegoddd. Commands now working in embedded mode: create, list, update, close, show, delete, search, query, label, gate, promote, move, merge-slot, quick, diff, count, find-duplicates, graph, dep, duplicate, epic, supersede, swarm, and views/reports. The issueops package extraction means both server and embedded backends share the same transactional logic.
This is the most active area of development and the primary gate for v1.0.0.
Contributors: coffeegoddd (Dustin Brown / DoltHub), matt wilkie (maphew), harry-miller-trimble, gzur, Algorune, sfncore, angelamayxie, paf0186, Patrick Farrell, Tim Visher.
brew upgrade bd
# or
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gastownhall/beads/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Breaking change: BD_ACTOR is deprecated in favor of BEADS_ACTOR. The old variable still works as a fallback but will be removed in a future release.
Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md | GitHub release: v0.62.0